‘A Cross Underneath One’s Clothing Is Okay’: An Interview with the Bishop of Arabia
If the bishop admitted he was seeking or encouraging converts, his life would be forfeit and so would the lives of his flock. Why is it that no one seems to know or understand this? You have to understand that he knows that his answers have public consequences.
And really, I think, the way the interview unfolds and the kind of vague answers he gives ought to be very informative about what it is like living as an infidel in a Muslim land.
I think whatever we judge him to be, coward or diplomat, is irrelevant to the real issue: that even what might appear to some people to be a small gain in religious freedom inside a Muslim land is really a confined, deliberate and exact following of the Dhimma – itself an institution that our distant ancestors knew about and understood but which we moderns have barely the scarcest notion of.
